Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

I should bring Francis back to dinner, I said, after they had finished with him. This she had not expected, and she was troubled. She had already invited young Arthur Plimpton, once more in London: partly out of fun, partly out of matchmaking.

‘I’d put him off,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t the slightest idea where he’s staying. Shall try to get him through the Embassy?’

‘Don’t bother,’ I told her. ‘At best, he may lighten the atmosphere.’

‘And there might be something of an atmosphere,’ she replied.

No, it was no use sounding robust to Margaret — but it was to Francis. As we drove home, under the lights of the Mall, he did not refer to my interrogation, although he knew of it. He believed me to be more worldly, less quixotic, than he was: which was quite true. He assumed that I took what came to me as all in the day’s work.

As for himself, he said: ‘I’m sorry that I let them do it.’

He was very quiet. When we got into the flat, Arthur was waiting in the drawing-room, greeting us politely. He went on: ‘Sir Francis, you look as though you could use a drink.’ He took charge, installed us in the armchairs, poured out the whisky. He was more adept than Francis’ own son, I was thinking. Which didn’t make him more endearing to Francis. But just then, Francis was blaming him, not only for his charm, but for his country. As Francis sat there, silent, courteous, hidalgo-like, he was searching for culprits on whom to blame that afternoon.

With Arthur present, I couldn’t talk directly to Francis: nor, when Margaret came in, could she. She saw him, usually the most temperate of men, taking another drink, very stiff: she hated minuets, she longed to plunge in. As it was, she had to talk about Cambridge, the college, the family. Penelope was still in the United States — how was she? Quite well, when they last heard, said Francis, for once sounding not over-interested in his favourite daughter.

‘I heard from her on Sunday, Sir Francis,’ said Arthur, dead-pan, like a man scoring an unobtrusive point.

‘Did you,’ Francis replied, not as a question.

‘Yes, she put in a transatlantic call.’

Margaret could not resist it. ‘What did she say?’

‘She wanted to know which was the best restaurant in Baltimore.’

Arthur had spoken politely, impassively, and without a glint in his eye. Margaret’s colour rose, but she went on. What was he going to do himself? Was he going back to the United States? Yes, said Arthur, he had settled on his career. He had arranged to enter the electronic industry. He talked about his firm-to-be with dismaying confidence. He knew more about business than Francis and Margaret and I all rolled together.

‘So you’ll be home again soon?’ asked Margaret.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Arthur. Suddenly, with an owlish look, he said: ‘Of course, I don’t know Penny’s plans.’

‘You don’t,’ said Margaret.

‘I suppose she won’t be back on this side?’

For once Margaret looked baffled. In Arthur’s craggy face, the blue eyes shone dazzlingly sincere: but under the flesh there was a lurking grin.

When he left us — out of good manners, because, listening, he had picked up what was unspoken in the air — I felt saddened. I looked at Francis, and saw, not the friend I had grown up with, but an ageing man, stern, not serene, not at all at peace. I had first met him when he was Arthur’s age. It had been pleasant — or so it seemed that night — to be arrogant and young.

‘Francis,’ said Margaret, ‘you’re being rather stupid about that boy.’

Francis gave an unprofessorial curse.

There was a silence.

‘I think,’ he spoke to her with trust and affection, as though it were a relief, ‘I’ve just about ceased to be useful. I think I’ve come to the limit.’

She said, that couldn’t be true.

‘I think it is,’ said Francis. He turned on me. ‘Lewis oughtn’t to have persuaded me. I ought to have got out of it straight away. I shouldn’t have been exposed to this.’

We began to quarrel. There was rancour in our voices. He blamed me, we both blamed Roger. Politicians never take care of their tools, said Francis, with increasing anger. You’re useful so long as you’re useful. Then you’re expendable. No doubt, said Francis bitterly, if things went wrong, Roger would play safe. In a gentlemanly fashion, he would go back to the fold: and in an equally gentlemanly fashion, his advisers would be disgraced.

‘You can’t be disgraced,’ said Margaret.

Francis began to talk to her in a more realistic tone. They would not keep him out just yet, he said. At least, he didn’t think so. They wouldn’t dare to say that he was a risk. And yet, when all this was over, win or lose, somehow it would be convenient for them not to involve him. The suggestion would go round that he didn’t quite fit in. It would be better to have safer men. As our kind of world went on, the men had to get safer and safer. You couldn’t afford to be different. No one could afford to have you, if you showed a trace of difference. The most valuable single gift was the ability to sing in unison. And so they would shut him out.

We went on quarrelling.

‘You’re too thin-skinned,’ I said, at my sharpest.

Margaret looked from him to me. She knew what in secret I had felt that day. She was wondering when, after Francis had gone, she could make a remark about the thinness of other skins.

The next evening, Margaret and I got out of the taxi on the Embankment and walked up into the Temple gardens. All day news had come prodding in, and I was jaded. The chief Government Whip had called on Roger. Some backbenchers, carrying weight inside the party, had to be reassured. Roger would have to meet them. Two Opposition leaders had been making speeches in the country the night before. No one could interpret the public opinion polls.

Yes, we were somewhere near a crisis, I thought with a kind of puzzlement, as I looked over the river at the lurid city sky. How far did it reach? Maybe in a few months’ time, some of the offices in this part of London would carry different names. Was that all? Maybe other lives stood to lose, lives stretched out under the lit-up sky. Roger and the others thought so: one had to think it, or it was harder to go on.

Those other lives did not respond much. A few did, not many. Perhaps they sent their messages to the corridors very rarely, when the dangers were on top of them: otherwise, perhaps the messages came not at all.

Back towards the Strand, the hall of my old Inn blazed out like a church on a Sunday night. We were on our way to a Bar concert. In the Inn buildings, lighted windows were shining here and there, oblongs of brilliance in a bulk of darkness. We passed the set of chambers where I had worked as a young man. Some of the names were still there, as they had been in my time. Mr H Getliffe: Mr W Allen. On the next staircase, I noticed the name of a contemporary: Sir H Salisbury. That was out of date: he had just been appointed Lord Justice of Appeal. Margaret, feeling that I was distracted, pressed my arm. This was a part of my life she hadn’t known; she was apt to be jealous of it, and, as we walked past the building in the sharp air, she believed that I was homesick. She was wrong. I had felt something more like irritation. The Bar had never really suited me, I had not once thought of going back. And yet, if I could have been content with it, I should have had a smoother time. Like Salisbury. I shouldn’t be in the middle of this present crisis.

The Hall was draughty. Chairs, white programmes gleaming on them as at a Church wedding, had been set in lines and then pushed into disorder, as people leaned over to talk. The event, though it didn’t sound it, was an occasion of privilege. Several Members from both front benches were there: Lord Lufkin and his entourage were there; so was Diana Skidmore, who had come with Monty Cave. As they shouted to one another, white-tied, bedecked, no one would have thought they were in a crisis. Much less that any of them resented, as I did, the moment in which we stood. They were behaving as though this was the kind of trouble politicians got into. They made jokes. They behaved as if these places were going to stay their own: while as for the rest — well, one could be reminded of them by the russet light of the City sky.